


On a Wayward Soul

by Unuora



Category: Kill Your Darlings (2013)
Genre: A New Life, M/M, Take Two, a happier end this time, where david kammerer doesnt die and the rebound is a lot more subtle
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-03
Updated: 2015-04-03
Packaged: 2018-03-21 03:40:45
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,572
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3676017
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Unuora/pseuds/Unuora
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stop; rewind. A glimpse of the what-if that could've been if only there was a little more time. </p>
<p>A love that is, instead of could've been.</p>
            </blockquote>





	On a Wayward Soul

**Author's Note:**

> i wrote the majority of this after i watched kyd for the first time. it was four am and to be fair, this could be leagues better. there are character and organizational oversights, but i dont care to change them much lest i deconstruct this entire story.
> 
> ill leave that for the next story.

“It’s a circle,” he says, words quiet and slurred but they’re the only thing you can hear, “You broke the circle, Al, you broke it.”

He had stumbled up to you, punch drunk and delirious, babbling and gesturing as if to make you understand. There’s a cigarette perched precariously between his fingertips, and it burns without notice. His eyes flutter and his head thunks against your shoulder. You fight the urge to laugh. He’s decomposed.

“It only gets bigger from here,” he says it like a revelation, like he’s professing his sins, “wider and wider until we both get lost in it.”

 

The image of Lucien pressed up against the bars of his cell comes to you in your dreams. You hear his voice, pleading, and you remember so sharply the tremble to his hand and the way his voice cracked.

You know acutely that Lucien Carr is not a good man. He does not want to be. You did the right thing.  
You did the right thing.  
You did the right thing.  
The right.  
What is right?

_You’ll kill me with that. Please, Allen!_

You realized, sometime, that Lucien is less than what he appears. He is an egotist, a grandiose man with more words than morals. He’s impulsive and crude and he is the sort of man to entrap anyone he wants into his plans. As many as possible and then he sits back and watches the chaos.

You notice his words wear away the longer you’re around him. You see him furious, distraught, broken and vindictive and his towers of self importance wear with familiarity. He is composed of fear, of the past, of the future, of words and desire, yet he leaves it all in his wake.

Lucien is everything and nothing and its no wonder a man like him is the spark of a revolution.

 

Honor killing. The words burn into your mind like a brand and when you look at Lucien you can’t meet his eyes. You hear the word ‘queer’ echo in your head and it’s in Lucien’s voice and you think about a time and a place where things might be different.

 

Years in the future you will write about him and the way he impacted you and he will scorn you for it.

  
Pause. Rewind.

 

He has his bags set and ready to go half way across the world. He is packed full of fury and false conviction and fear.

You beg him not to leave. He is stern and relentlessly angry and he turns on you with the force of all of the oceans. You don’t flinch this time. His face is twisted, fists clenched and he tells you to leave but you stay. You mark a place between him and the world, and you know in your heart this is right.

You love a man who is not a good man, but you think there is still good in you. He may scathe you, spit bitter words with a silver tongue, but you know this is right. This is right.

You look at him and you see him tremble and you watch the emotion flow and ebb behind his so very, very blue eyes. He can’t meet yours. He opens his mouth to speak but nothing comes out and he chokes.

You move to put your hand on his shoulder but you think better of it in the last second.

“Spontaneity is your drive. So why not this?” You look at him steadily, despite how fear runs through your veins and settles in the tremble of your fingertips. “Because of what the world thinks? Because of what you’re raised to believe? I thought the Vision was to break those laws. What’s the difference?”

His head twitches up, jaw snapping shut. You see him clench his teeth by the sneer of his lips and for a second you think you are going to be hit.

You never are.

You know you should stop there but you can’t, not now. “It’s a circle, Lu,” you say, quiet and regretful, “You can’t keep running. There’s incredible virtue right here, right now, you just… need to stay long enough to see it.”

He has his head in his hands. He makes a sound that is too close to a sob and you stand there, watching. After a moment, he sinks to the floor, curls into himself and does not move. He cries but he does not show it.

His bags remain untouched on the ground. There is a knock on the door, but you do not answer and Lucien does not move. You lock the windows and the doors, and even pull the shades and you don’t see anyone.  
  
Miles away, Jack waits and waits but Lucien doesn’t show up. He goes home and sits by the record player for a long time, listening to the recording Sammy sent and he thinks. In this life things end up differently, and maybe he thinks about taking his second chance.

Lucien sleeps on the floor because you are too afraid to touch him. You can’t bear to sleep in his bed, and you can’t bear to leave so you sit and read and read until the sun peaks through the dusty shades.

_I saw that all beings are fated to happiness: action is not life, but a way of wasting some force, an ennervation. Morality is the weakness of the brain._

 

There was a fight. David and Lucien had a _disagreement_ of sorts and it had ended in fury. Lucien did not have his knife and David grabbed and insisted and Lucien clipped his face. It was daytime and they were in the city and someone called the cops.

Lucien got a fine and David was sent off for harassment. Then the story came out, all the years of stalking and grabbing and he was told to keep away. For once, he did. David Kammerer was lost to the wind, and what ever happened, whatever was said in those few minutes of turmoil, he was forgotten.

Lucien stayed in his room with an old book, and a stack of photos for a long, long time.

And maybe, just maybe, Lucien took out an old typewriter and wrote. Some words here, there, and he didn’t think about David or the ordinance of language, he just made words about something.  
  
about feeling  
  
about love  
  
about sensation

_I will not speak, I will have no thoughts:_

_But infinite love will mount in my soul;_

_And I will go far, far off, like a gypsy,_  
  
_Through the country side- joyous as if I were… if I were with a…_

 

He comes to you late at night, long after the moon had risen and crawled across the sky. You were awake, breathing slow and your head in your hands. Thoughts ran heavy in your head and heart and you did not hear him when he knocked. You didn’t hear his tentative footsteps and when he touched your shoulder gently you flinched like you had been shocked.

“Lucien?” You ignore the way your voice cracks. He looks raw and haggard and his eyes are bloodshot. His mouth hangs open as if words will fall out if he waits long enough. He turns away, face scrunching up and his mouth becomes a pained line.

“I’m sorry,” is what he says and the last thing you were expecting. “You were never supposed to be part of my vision. But, then again, you created it, didn’t you?” He shoots you a smirk that does not go well with the weariness in his eyes and the gaunt look of him.

He walks away again and you let him.

You wonder for a long time what that’s supposed to mean. You wonder if it matters.

 

 

“I never meant it to be, not after him. Never after him,” he says. You know what he means, even if you never spoke of it and he never said anything. “But it’s more than that, it’s so much more than that and I never could see it.”

“I know,” you say, because you do. You watch as he pulls out a cigarette and he smokes it in long, contemplative breaths. His eyes flick to the whisky on his desk but he doesn’t grab it. He hasn’t drunk in a week and that was the farthest thing from what you were expecting.

He is the definition of unexpected.

He shakes his head, desperately, weighed with emotion. “No, you don’t,” he says, not unkindly, “He wasn’t… right. It wasn’t real.”

He takes your hands suddenly, grasping them with his familiar conviction. “You are more. There is more than a million words or a haunted memory. You are the motive, the spark, and I never saw that.”

You pull out your own cigarette, taking a draw and letting the smoke slip through the slight curve of your smile. “As you are to me, Lu, I know.”

Like a weight lifted, he leans against you heavily. He drapes against you, and you think it no accident when his lips press against your neck and his hand ends up clutched in the fabric of your shirt.

 

He kisses you. This time it’s him and you feel the emotion in the curve of his body and when you kiss back he makes a noise in the back of his throat that you dare call desperation.

 

The libertine circle is broken, but not quite. It expands larger, and larger, across continents, oceans. Thus is life, Lucien laughs as he watches as his vision draws up anger and rejuvenation from San Francisco to New York.

The members kept contact, abruptly and hesitantly, but mostly stayed apart. Each writer was their own, holding tightly onto the original belief of breaking rules and rejecting normalcy, throwing their words into the wind.

What happened in Columbia, all of the frantic words and excitement, the drugs, the chaos, the feelings, were just the spark. It was just the excited jabbering of angry teenagers that meant nothing until it did.

Jack and William wrote, as you did, and even, after some time, Lucien as well. Their movement was well on its way, and Lucien wrote words that were never meant to be said. Words about love, and loss, and betrayal, and fury.

It was a new life.

 

 

You both drop out of school. There’s no reason, no purpose, but you look around and see the words on your paper and the ones you’re supposed to say and it’s ridiculous to keep going. Columbia was nothing it was supposed to be and everything that changed your life. You suppose its best you leave it at that.

When you leave, Professor Steeves stops you, and puts a hand on your shoulder. He wishes you well, and when you publish your first book he buys a copy from you personally.

 

You’re writing. You’re always writing nowadays. Words flow from your fingertips in an endless flow and once again he comes to you when you are lost in a whirlwind of fragmented ideas, thoughts, feelings.

He sits down this time, on the edge of your bed in your lackluster apartment, looking at the bleached walls, the shelves stacked with notebooks, pens, old books with their spines broken. It’s been three weeks since the last time you saw Lucien, and he says nothing. You type.

When you’re done, the sun is looming low on the horizon, sending light cascading through the cracked window. It illuminates the room, in a hazy hue of oranges and reds.

By the time you are finished, he has laid down on your bed, curled on his side. He watches you lazily, blue eyes sharp in the wash of dying sunlight. You sit for a moment, seeing him out of the corner of your eye, and you are breathless. Your fingertips burn with the need to touch. You want him forever, to keep and hold and maintain for the rest of eternity but you know a man like Lucien Carr is not one who stays.

You curl into bed, to his back, and you do not touch. He turns over, face to face, and there is something scrutinizing in his eyes. You cannot find any words worth saying, nothing that don’t involve love, desire, need, that gasp of longing you can’t seem to escape, so you say nothing.

“What were you writing?” He asks, so quietly it’s almost swallowed up in the silence.

“Nothing,” you say, letting your eyes slip shut, “A poem.” He looks at you like you are a wonder, a star that’s glory is unprecedented and it consumes you.

He gently, so very gently, curls his fingers between yours and you stifle the emotion that threatens to fight up your throat. It’s been three weeks since you’ve seen him, eight since he started acting like you held the key to his damnation in your hands, since he kissed you, wholesome and with an edge of needlovedesire you found dizzying.

He’s afraid, of you, the past, himself, and you respect that even if it’s your desolation.

You feel his fingers brush against your cheek, underneath the edge of your jaw, settling on the nape of your neck. You feel the trembling in his fingers, and you can’t bear to open your eyes. “Lu,” you say quiet, pleading. All your words are lost in translation, and he pays you no mind.

His fingertips play at the fringes of your hair, too long, in need of a cut. When he rests his palm against your neck it’s warm, and you get lost in it.

You open your eyes and he looks at you unwaveringly. He is six inches from you and you are drowning and you know you can’t hide that from him. “You’re my inspiration, I can’t live without you no matter how hard I try,” he says with a hint of a smile. You’re not sure what to say, words trapped somewhere behind your tongue. It sounds like rejection, spoken like praise.  
  
“No more running,” he says, “If you truly love something, it’ll always circle back. It becomes part of you.”

“Or it’ll destroy you,” you finish quietly. You swallow hard and you look very hard at the pattern of the blanket, the weave of fabric.

“This won’t destroy either of us,” he cracks a smile at you, hesitantly, “Could I give this another try?” You become acutely aware of your entwined hands. He seems to see the doubt behind your eyes and he continues. “You’re right; this vision is about moving forward. You’re not David. You never will be.”

You huff a laugh, and you found the courage to pull closer. You smile broadly into his shoulder, and when you squeeze his hand, he squeezes back.

He pulls you back gently after a moment, and when you meet his eyes you’re giddy with happiness. He kisses you delicately, chaste, like you are ethereal and something to be cherished. Your hands move from jaw, to shoulder, down arms and settle at his shoulder blades. When he breaks the kiss, he presses his lips to your neck and you feel his smile. You keep him close, relishing in the fact that he is there, warm, real, alive.

You adore Lucien Carr with everything, and when he sighs against you like the world has been taken off his shoulders you know that he loves you too.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> the first quote is by arthur rimbaud  
> i wanted one of the focuses here to be morality. there is a huge question of what is right and wrong, to each other, to the world, to themselves, and a wrong choice can leave a mighty mark. leave others' morals with them, rimbaud says, and let the happiness come.
> 
> the second is also by rimbaud, titled "sensation"  
> perhaps i was too overt with this one. i still like the imagery that is represented, and i felt that it would be important for lu to lose himself in his writing before he could find himself in his writing.
> 
> thank you for reading. i hope you enjoyed. <3


End file.
